A Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has become an essential part of daily work and life. With a WLAN, people may check mail, chat on WeChat, browse Weibo, watch a video, browse news, etc. anytime anywhere, such as at home, on the way to work, in office, and the like.
While greatly facilitating daily work and life, a WLAN is subject to greater risk of being hacked compared with a wired network, due to openness of a WLAN channel. Therefore, security issue has been a major factor hindering development of WLAN.
To secure a WLAN, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has proposed various technologies for wireless network encryption, such as that for filtering a Media Access Control (MAC) address.
By MAC address filtering, it is verified whether a MAC address of a client station (STA) is legal. A STA with a legal MAC address is deemed as a legal STA. A legal STA is allowed to access a network. Network access by an illegal STA is refused.
However, in a specific application, a legal MAC address may be stolen by intercepting a wireless frame between an Access Point (AP) and equipment with a legal MAC address using MAC address changing software such as MacChanger. Illegal equipment may then access a wireless network and steal a network resource by tampering a MAC address thereof with the stolen legal MAC address.
It thus may be seen that although security in wireless network resource utilization may be enhanced and network resource theft may be prevented to some extent by verifying a MAC address, there is still a serious issue of security and theft of bandwidth resources of a wireless network.